100 Greatest Novels of All Time

I like following insane reading challenges, as I enjoy pushing myself, and I dearly hope lots of reading will have a positive effect in my ever-mushening mind, so I am going to read the 100 greatest novels, as chosen by a bunch of literary critics in the Guardian. Scrolling down the list I have already read 20 of them, and the first volume of Proust, so it could be worse. Although I see Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is on the list, a book that I can see that from where I sit, it is the size of a phone book, and one of the longest novels ever written. And D. H Lawrence is there with The Rainbow, which is don’t want to read, and neither do I want to read Lord Of The Flies as I saw the film and that was harrowing enough.

But I love the idea of having read all of those books, even if I am dreading a few. After that you could throw me into a dinner party with clever people anywhere and I’d be fine. And that in itself is one of the best parts of this, as reading is armour, mental, emotional, and social armour. World, come at me, I got books.

And when people talk about Don Quixote and windmills, I’ll know exactly what he did to or with windmills, rather than just vaguely guessing, having absorbed the information through educational osmosis and Simpsons episodes.

I fear it may be like Pamela! It seems she gets into some scrapes and is generally annoying, and there is a great quote form Samuel Johnson – “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.”

I’m embarrassed that I haven’t yet read Don Quixote when I consider that the 1980s teen idol Nik Kershaw wrote a song about him. It feels like there should be a word invented for this sense of shame. A sort of celebrity variant of the embarrassment felt at parties of clever people.

Bloody hell, I’ve just watched the video for that on Youtube and am more confused than ever, When not stalking a poor couple and hiding in the back of their old VW Golf, Nik and his mullet chase what appears to be a deluded man on horseback about La Mancha. Still, I don’t mind Nik Kershaw knowing more than I do. If Katie Price had read it and I hadn’t, I’d feel worse. I’m aware that last sentence makes me a total snob 😉

I’ve always protected myself from music videos so as to have my own imagery when listening – maybe I’ve been missing out though? Weird one this. Kershaw seems to be an observer who, while separate from the events, underlines his simultaneous immersion in them with the line ‘here I am’. Maybe this relates to his claim that we’re all fantasists (ie. that it’s easy to slip into a trap in thinking that we’re observers of others who are the fantasists)? Or maybe it relates to Quixote’s companion?
You might be able to shed light on the video once you’ve read the book. Or vice versa. Sounds wrong either way around though, doesn’t it?

I’m loving this avenue of literary criticism via the medium of 80’s mulleted pop sensations. That should totally be a thing. We should crash the tourbus on one of those 80’s pop tours and find out the thoughts of Howard Jones, Kim Wilde and Limahl on Proust, Solzhenitsyn and Sebald. That right there would be blogging gold!

For a little while there when I was a kid, I lived down the road from The Cure’s Robert Smith. If he still lives there, we could add him to the tour bus of 80s pop stars that have restraining orders against us 😉
I’ve just googled songs inspired by novels, and it seems “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen is from “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, but alas, I fear that is not enough to make you willingly listen to a Queen song 😀

Indeed, it is not. I fear my allergy to Queen is so strong that I’ll now have to avoid ‘the Stranger’ until I forget that particular fun fact about it, or I’ll be hearing the godawful racket in my head every time I look at it, and that’ll just bring me out in hives.